A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive Books
Amazon Products

 Rating: - A bit short but definitely inspiring.
I'm not a big book reader so of course I was the last person in my group of friends to read A Child Called It. Having heard so many good things about the book, I had really high hopes for it and fortunately I found it be so good that I read it straight through in a couple of hours.

So what's the book about? A Child Called it is an autobiographical account of a young boy named Dave and his horrible childhood. At first, Dave's family seemed perfect. His mother was doting and a perfect housewife. His dad was a firefighter. He had two brothers and the lot of them would go on wonderful family vacations. Then, almost overnight, Dave's mother becomes violent and seperates Dave from the rest of the family. She makes him starve, forces him to do chores (when his brothers don't have to do any), and even stabs him. A Child Called It describes the gruesome events that surrounded his childhood leading up to the day Dave is taken away from his mother.

Let's talk about the positives first. Although this book mainly describes the horrible things that Dave was forced to go through, I liked that it was still written as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Dave goes into detail about certain events in which he was disgustingly mistreated. The most heartbreaking scenes deal with events in which Dave's mother appears to show some sympathy towards the boy, giving Dave hope, only to return back to her unloving state. I don't consider myself to be an emotional person but I actually shed a few tears during one point.

I think the biggest part of the book that I enjoyed was the overall feeling of Dave pushing himself to survive even through his grim circumstances. Dave had to deal with physical problems as well as emotional problems and he still pushed himself through it all. I think that's incredible.

And now for the negatives. I personally feel that the book is short. I understand that Dave Pelzer had plans to turn his story into a trilogy but as an individual book, I felt that there should've been more. Other reviewers have mentioned that certain parts of the book seem to be a bit overly dramatized. In a way I agree but there's no way of knowing if Mr. Pelzer stretched the truth a bit or things did indeed happen the way they were described in the book.

If you're like me and you haven't read this amazing book yet, I encourage you to read it whenever you can. It's truly inspiring and I can't wait to read the others.

Search: